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I feel somewhat ashamed, because I actually DID guess the film before clicking
Ah well...

nor are there any surprising visuals

I think he meant surprising visuals like Eddie Murphy in a fat suit or Ben Stiller fighting a dinosaur skeleton. Hey, sorry if not all of us find long tracking shots of dirty water visually arresting. You can keep your old, foreign "cinema", that's just more Waynes brothers for me!

Well, at least he finds that dvd cover "cool", probably because it looks like "Hellraiser Part 16" or something.

So... ](*,) This is all the worse because I know this person. This person is a friend of mine. After giving him a few choice dvds to facilitate his attempt to "get into movies", I get this message:

"i watched M the other day, it was black and white in german. It's about some child molester right? i kinda dozed off at the end. it looked good tho, i'll probably watch the other guys this weekend"

siiiiggghhhh

When I saw what film it was I think my heart died a little. Give him a good kick to the head for me (or at least the shin.)

LQ wrote:So... ](*,) This is all the worse because I know this person. This person is a friend of mine. After giving him a few choice dvds to facilitate his attempt to "get into movies", I get this message:

"i watched M the other day, it was black and white in german. It's about some child molester right? i kinda dozed off at the end. it looked good tho, i'll probably watch the other guys this weekend"

siiiiggghhhh

What else did you give him?

Since he said he wasn't ..fond.. of black&white movies (aaaak) I gave him a sampler of luminous b&w films that anyone would appreciate to try to change his mind. Third Man, Breathless and a few others.
I've lost all hope though...after that.

Yeah, well, Stalker . . . it's tough going. I love it, but if you're not interested in respecting film as something other than popcorn entertainment, it'll fly right past you. I think it takes a certain education in film to understand Stalker, which unfortunately is something that most people don't comprehend as even possible - we're raised to expect cinema to do our thinking for us. Tarkovsky respected his audience too much, in this sense.

I've made a friend recently who is highly motivated to make his own short films. He's spent a good deal on gear and is working his way through all the technical problems with hobbyist digital filmmaking, but seems to have a limited exposure to foreign film. I lent him a few discs from my collection that I think would be great for someone interested in film as a process.

He thought Andrei Rublev was intensely dull and morose. I'd given him my blessing to keep the disc forever, with the understanding that he'd watch it again and then again, to really understand it, but he returned it with the assurance that he'd never want to try again. I thought that perhaps I'd simply overshot with this film, that it resonates for specific reasons that don't work with him.

But then he rejected Persona as "too intense".

He furthermore rejected Svankmajer's "Alice" as the work of someone on a lot of drugs. I wanted to slap him, or at least say, "That's rediculus!" But it's difficult, when you're not invested in making film, to point out to someone who is so invested that what they just watched involved extreme degrees of creativity.

What is left to art without intensity? I'll tell you: problems with driver incompatibility.

bunuelian wrote: I think it takes a certain education in film to understand Stalker, which unfortunately is something that most people don't comprehend as even possible - we're raised to expect cinema to do our thinking for us. Tarkovsky respected his audience too much, in this sense.

All this is absolutely true, of course. And you can't blame anyone per se who doesn't like Tarkovsky, "M", "Persona" or whatever favourite film of ours. But there's a difference between simply not liking certain styles of filmmaking and writing about the experience in the vague way that 'reviewer' did. As that website says, " Mr. Harie works at the University of Central Florida Library, and is an avid movie lover". The site also states that its "Examiners are credible, passionate, knowledgeable writers." A little bit of research would have told him that he wasn't talking about some super-obscure Russian film nobody else had ever heard of.

Love that pic of his, btw. Should Skuhn ever look for a new avatar again, this would be a good choice

I must admit, the first time I saw Stalker I really struggled with it despite having read the book it is based on. However, it did leave its mark upon me and when I rewatched it I discovered that actually, most of the film had been burned into my mind.

I think the real killer in that review is not the lack of visuals, which is just a stupid thing to say about as beautiful a film as Stalker, it's the "there's nobody to root for" line.

I hear this quite a bit and I think that the correlation between people who say it and people who are in fact idiots is as close to 1.0 as you can get given margins of statistical error. I find the need to sympathise with characters to be genuinely weird. Empathy is one thing (create good character, regardless of how sympathetic it is and people will empathise with it) but the need to pick sides and watch a film hoping that the character overcomes adversity is just a horrific way to approach any work of art or entertainment. I think it marks an addiction to emotional manipulation and a refusal to think about issues in abstract terms.

It's like Big Brother or sports... people seem incapable of enjoying something that doesn't involve conflict between obviously sympathetic people and obviously evil people. Ugh. I feel unclean just thinking about that mindset.

Perhaps I tend to confuse empathy with sympathy, but part of the greatness of "Stalker" for me has always been that I could clearly sympathize with all of the main characters because they are broken, ambivalent and full of human weaknesses (the same goes for "Solaris", of course, perhaps even more so). Obviously 'good' or 'evil' characters, on the other hand, far less invite an emotional response. Think of "Lord of the Rings": people might find Mortensen or Tyler appealing, but it's no wonder that everyone I know finds Gollum the most interesting character. Personally I even find him the most sympathetic of all in his own weird way.

Apologies for discussing these two films side by side.

bunuelian wrote: I've made a friend recently who is highly motivated to make his own short films. He's spent a good deal on gear and is working his way through all the technical problems with hobbyist digital filmmaking, but seems to have a limited exposure to foreign film. I lent him a few discs from my collection that I think would be great for someone interested in film as a process.

He thought Andrei Rublev was intensely dull and morose. I'd given him my blessing to keep the disc forever, with the understanding that he'd watch it again and then again, to really understand it, but he returned it with the assurance that he'd never want to try again. I thought that perhaps I'd simply overshot with this film, that it resonates for specific reasons that don't work with him.

But then he rejected Persona as "too intense".

In a similar situation with a friend of mine. He's going to film school and everything, but it's like pulling teeth to even get him to watch anything. I've only managed to get him to watch Amarcord and The Seventh Continent, both of which he actually liked. Despite this he still would rather watch 10,000 B. C. then The Tenant. He actually flat out refused to watch Barry Lyndon for the length.

knives wrote:In a similar situation with a friend of mine. He's going to film school and everything, but it's like pulling teeth to even get him to watch anything. I've only managed to get him to watch Amarcord and The Seventh Continent, both of which he actually liked. Despite this he still would rather watch 10,000 B. C. then The Tenant. He actually flat out refused to watch Barry Lyndon for the length.

I guess that makes it kind of obvious what kind of films your friend wants to make.

You'd think that someone who is going to be studying the techniques of film would want to familiarise themselves with the best examples of certain techniques and at least get used to looking at film as an artistic process.

bunuelian wrote:Yeah, well, Stalker . . . it's tough going. I love it, but if you're not interested in respecting film as something other than popcorn entertainment, it'll fly right past you. I think it takes a certain education in film to understand Stalker, which unfortunately is something that most people don't comprehend as even possible - we're raised to expect cinema to do our thinking for us. Tarkovsky respected his audience too much, in this sense.

I'm not sure I'd agree with that, as I saw Stalker on its original UK release (at the late lamented Academy Cinema, now the Oxford Street Marks & Spencers), when I must have been about thirteen. In fact, I think it was the first subtitled film I'd ever seen in the cinema - I always thought it was Diva, but I can't have seen that until the following year. And while I certainly can't pretend I grasped everything intellectually, I found it completely compelling on a gut level. In fact, along with 2001 a couple of years earlier, it was the film that demonstrated to me that the medium could do far, far more than just deliver pre-packaged entertainment.

He thought Andrei Rublev was intensely dull and morose. I'd given him my blessing to keep the disc forever, with the understanding that he'd watch it again and then again, to really understand it, but he returned it with the assurance that he'd never want to try again. I thought that perhaps I'd simply overshot with this film, that it resonates for specific reasons that don't work with him.

I took my wife to Andrei Rublev, which was a mistake for all sorts of reasons. I don't think she'd have liked it much anyway, but it didn't help that we'd spent the morning visiting a pretty overwhelming National Gallery exhibition of Russian landscape painting (so she really wasn't in the mood for a three-hour Russian epic), the subtitles on the print were embarrassingly bad (including some toe-curling American slang), and the cinema itself was freezing. Not a success.

He furthermore rejected Svankmajer's "Alice" as the work of someone on a lot of drugs. I wanted to slap him, or at least say, "That's rediculus!" But it's difficult, when you're not invested in making film, to point out to someone who is so invested that what they just watched involved extreme degrees of creativity.

I've met Jan Svankmajer on a great many occasions, and he's one of the most disarmingly normal-looking people I can think of - if you didn't know any better, you'd think he was a retired doctor or lawyer. And the idea that you can make his type of painstakingly calculated frame-by-frame cinema in any state other than completely rational focused concentration is frankly hilarious.

But then again, most of the cinema's great nutjobs come across as startlingly sane in person - Guy Maddin, David Lynch, Ken Russell and Andrzej Zulawski spring immediately to mind, but I'm sure there are loads of other examples.

MichaelB wrote:But then again, most of the cinema's great nutjobs come across as startlingly sane in person - Guy Maddin, David Lynch, Ken Russell and Andrzej Zulawski spring immediately to mind, but I'm sure there are loads of other examples.

James Woods says much the same thing about David Cronenberg near the beginning of the Videodrome commentary!

More problems with the subtitles on the Let the Right One In DVD:

Amazon user Ernest D. Cossiboom wrote:WARNING: ENGLISH VIEWERS WILL HAVE TO READ THIS MOVIE!

I don't understand why so many wonderful movies are showing up for sale in the United States that require English speaking viewers to read them. Of course, it's a small world after all, but until they can come up with English language audio, these movies need to stay in their countries of origin. How many people in the United States speak Swedish, anyway?

It should be noted that this DVD actually includes an English dub track. As the default audio option.

Sigh.

Give him a break, he's been burned before:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good flick in the wrong language, March 1, 2009
WARNING--"SPANISH LANGUAGE FILM--ENGLISH VIEWERS MUST READ THIS FEATURE."

When I pick up a movie in the United States, I really expect it to feature English language. I'm sorry if that seems offensive, but I don't even like to have to choose "English" when I call about my insurance or credit cards. English is still the official language here, and I think we should work to ensure that it stays that way. Anyone who can't speak English should learn before they arrive. I wouldn't go to Mexico without knowing Spanish.

With that said, I love horror films, and this one is very good. Still, I read all week long in my job, and the last thing that I want to do on the weekend is kick back and read a movie. If these movie makers want to break into American movie markets, and make American dollars, they should have to bring American buyers English language films. At least put a big warning on the front cover that says "SPANISH LANGUAGE FILM--ENGLISH VIEWERS MUST READ THIS FEATURE."

If these movie makers want to break into American movie markets, and make American dollars, they should have to bring American buyers English language films.

Didn't The Orphanage make a pretty big sum of money for a small release?

I wonder what Ernest D Cossiboom is reading all day at work? My interest is piqued.

I did find his phone number and home address while Googling his name, if you want to ask him

When I pick up a movie in the United States, I really expect it to feature English language. I'm sorry if that seems offensive, but I don't even like to have to choose "English" when I call about my insurance or credit cards. English is still the official language here, and I think we should work to ensure that it stays that way. Anyone who can't speak English should learn before they arrive. [. . .] If these movie makers want to break into American movie markets, and make American dollars, they should have to bring American buyers English language films.

Now that's what I call a patriot.

Some guy wrote:English is still the official language here, and I think we should work to ensure that it stays that way.

So who wants to break it to him that there is no official language in The United States?

Jeff, why do you hate America

Some Guy wrote:I wouldn't go to Mexico without knowing Spanish.

I'll give him credit for at least holding himself to his own loony standards. Too bad it most likely means he's planning on never traveling outside America.

Is there anything worth visiting outside America anyway?